Floating Dragon

by Peter Straub

Graham turned his back on him, disgusted, and stalked out of the mahogany-paneled anteroom into the much larger area the Historical Society had filled with long library tables. Framed maps and portraits of both men and houses lined the walls; cases against the walls held bound manuscripts and books of drawings and sketches. Graham dropped his pens and pads of paper on one of the front tables as noisily as possible. Then he shoved his hands back in his pockets and made a rapid tour of the paintings, all of which he had seen many times before. He ended before a hand-painted map of the Hampstead-Patchin seacoast; marshes and wetlands had been sketched in, an Indian raised a bow at the site of a massacre in 1645, a redcoat soldier stood at attention on Kendall Point. The mapmaker, who had made wildly inaccurate guesses about the shape of the coastline and the distances between his various landmarks, had inked in the date on the bottom-right-hand corner: 1803. Graham had often wished that he could meet the anonymous mapmaker: could suggest that he wait another eight years before finishing his work. If he’d drawn the map in 1811, Graham was sure that he’d have had a more interesting image to place on Kendall Point.

  “Mr. Williams? Mr. Williams?”

  Graham turned sharply, almost jerkily away from both the hand-painted map and his preoccupations. The young man was standing before a mound of books and papers; he looked even more pleased with himself than he had before.

  “I found quite a lot of material,” he said. “You’ve got copies of the New Haven papers and broadsides for the summer months of 1873, copies of the Patchin newspaper, all the books I thought might even be a tiny bit helpful—and I remembered that other thing I mentioned.” With his index finger he pushed forward on the table a slim book in a gray library binding. “Ever heard of Stephen Pollock?”

  Graham impatiently shook his head.

  “Pollock is supposed to have influenced Washington Irving. Anyhow, Pollock wrote a book called Curious Voyages—a travel book. And that’s what I thought of earlier. He was in Connecticut in 1873, and he took a coach from New York to New Haven.” He smiled brilliantly; pointed to the front door with a gold ball-point. “Which means that he passed this house. He was on the Old Post Road.”

  * * *

  Graham put the Pollock book aside, intending to look at it later, and spent several hours looking through the mimeographed newspapers from the summer of 1873. What was most startling, he thought, was the deadly indifference—the calm—into which the Black Summer had fallen. Now and then there was a reference to the change in the coach schedules, or the shipping patterns; and in the Patchin newspaper he caught a jocular reference to the sudden prosperity of the area’s undertakers, the profusion of coins in the gravediggers’ pockets. What was most startling was that no one had seemed startled—half a town had died, and in the neighboring towns people shut their eyes and made jokes about rich gravediggers. They had spent years pretending that Hampstead no longer existed.

  Still not picking up the Pollock book, Graham sent the graduate student back into the stacks for information about the burning of Patchin in 1779—he wanted to let his mind play over various events of the thirty-year cycle. Tryon landing at Kendall Point: the English and the Jaeger mercenaries swarming up over that wooded, stony land: in a violent storm, putting houses and farms to the torch.

  The soldiers had trampled across Gideon Winter’s grave to sack the town.

  Kendall Point. Sometimes Kendall Point seemed to reach out toward Hampstead, to grasp at it . . . as though it fed on the town.

  A chill went over Graham’s body, and he saw himself as he was, a bent old man, no longer very strong—the strongest part of him now was his voice. And this was what he proposed to set against Kendall Point and Gideon Winter; because of ideas he had been chasing for fifty years; because once he had fought a madman on a boat and imagined that he had been fighting even more.

  How long had it been since he had seen Kendall Point? Graham realized that he had not been out there since he had begun looking into Hampstead’s history—in those days, still really a boy, he had gone out for a look at the place. He had seen . . . nothing. He had looked at trees, rocks, the water. He had walked down into the ravine left behind by the events of 1811; and there too he had looked at boulders, exposed earth, caverns washed out by erosion, tough ropy weeds crawling over all; nothing. He had looked but not seen. He had been thinking about Tryon’s soldiers and how they had landed; he had not paid enough attention to the Point itself, to the heart of what was all about him.

  Almost without realizing he was doing it, Graham pushed himself back from the long table and stood up. Still he could feel traces of his goosebumps scattered across his back and down his arms.

  He turned to the painted map. In its light wooden frame, it had a decorative, pastel look, like something found in the room of a small child. Graham walked toward this innocent, inaccurate map.

  Where Greenbank was, the mapmaker had drawn two little farms and sketched in extensive marshland. Graham stared moodily at these for a moment, then looked once again at Kendall Point.

  It was larger, more bloated than in reality. The redcoat stood at attention in the middle of this distorted Point, his musket propped on his shoulder. Graham squinted and leaned closer to the framed map: he had never really looked carefully at the face of the little redcoat.

  Then he was frozen there, bending over with his own face only inches from the glass covering the map, because he had seen the little figure move. The redcoat was lowering his musket, spreading his legs.

  The little figure’s mouth split open in a wide grin: He was not a drawing anymore, he was antic and alive, and he was unshouldering his gun. Graham was dimly aware, in the midst of his astonishment, that the lines on the map were flying about, making jagged patterns around the little figure. The redcoat winked at Graham, raised the gun and sighted down the barrel. When he pulled the trigger Graham heard a pop! like the explosion of a small balloon.

  In the next second a tiny starburst appeared in the glass covering the map.

  Graham jumped back, fearing for a second that he’d been struck by the ball. Then he saw it, embedded in the broken glass—a black metal dot, gnat-sized. A tiny flame sprang up in the middle of the redcoat’s chest.

  * * *

  Just before the young man in the bow tie rushed into the reading room, Graham finally noticed what had happened to the lines on the map. The seacoast from New Haven to the Norrington border was the snouted, horned profile of a dragon. He groaned—feeling as if he had caught a real bullet in his intestines, a sharp twist of sudden agony.

  “Mr. Williams? Anything happen?” the young man said. He’d come in such a hurry that he had left his jacket unbuttoned. Then he saw the map.

  “What did you do?” He gaped at Graham, then back at the wall. Flames were sprouting beneath the glass, curling over the distorted depiction of Kendall Point. The figure of the redcoat had blackened and shriveled. “My God,” the boy said. He ran to the map, and touched the frame to take it off the wall. Immediately he snatched his hands back, wincing. “It’s burning!” he said, still stunned. He threw off his blazer and used it to grasp one side of the frame. The boy awkwardly wrestled the map off the wall, and the glass struck the boards. “What . . . ?” the boy said, looking wildly at Graham.

  “Fire extinguisher,” Graham said. “You need a fire extinguisher.”

  “You wait here, Mr. Williams,” the boy said. “I mean it. You just wait right here.”

  “I think you’d better hurry,” Graham said.

  The boy looked in anguish at the little flames lifting up from the map, turned around, and ran out of the reading room.

  Graham went nearer the map. He stepped on the flames and ground them out. In the depths of the building, the boy slammed a door. Graham went slowly to the long table and picked up his pens and notepads. He slipped Stephen Pollock’s Curious Voyages into the stack of his papers. He was out the front door and halfway down the cobbled walk to his old car before the door deep in the building slammed again
.

  Breathing hard, he turned on the ignition. Just before he drove away he looked sideways at the bow windows of the Historical Society and saw the face of the young man inside shouting something at him. Graham threw the car in gear, stepped on the accelerator, and made one of the most impetuous departures of his life.

  He was pointed in the direction of Patchin, away from Hampstead, and flicked on his turn signal before going around the block; but after he had turned seaward, he continued straight on Harbor Road and did not circle back toward Mount Avenue and Greenbank. He was going to Kendall Point.

  * * *

  Where the road ended in a sweep of gravel before a crumbled wall, Graham parked his car and went slowly across the broken surface of the asphalt to the gravel. He put a shoe on the low wall, feeling a barely suppressed excitement. It was the tone he had not understood before, that hectic, gleeful tone of the Dragon’s.

  Looking out at Kendall Point, Graham felt twenty years drop away from him—thirty years. He had his little pain in his chest, his right knee throbbed, and his back was giving him regular twinges, but he was on the verge of discovery: of breakthrough. He knew it. And the Dragon knew it too. Like Tabby Smithfield alone on Gravesend Beach, Graham could have shouted, “Show me!” and meant all of Tabby’s defiance.

  Before Graham was a leafy gorge perhaps twenty feet deep, with gentle sides and huge boulders on the bottom to make it an easy matter to cross over to the other side. Beyond the gorge was a flat grassy plain with a stand of ancient oaks and white spruce in its center; at its edges, this plain degenerated into marsh, which itself degenerated into stony beach just before the waterline. From where Graham stood, at the end of the roadway, to the farthest tip of the Point was a distance of perhaps two hundred yards.

  The inhabited land reached by the end of Harbor Road—the territory behind Graham now—still looked surprisingly as it had the last time Graham Williams had come out to Kendall Point. The Depression had somehow hit this obscure corner of Hillhaven ten years early and had never left.

  As Graham saw it now, the Dragon had spoiled this place. Directly beside the curved end of the road stood a white building with a concrete terrace partially visible behind a tall fence. The building had a long ground-floor window facing the Sound, and ranks of smaller windows in the upper floors—in one of these a pair of tights dried on a line, in another a Budweiser lamp flickered. Graham had always felt certain that this building was a bar, but it had no name, no sign; for that reason and because of the line of little windows, he assumed also that it was a whorehouse. It looked like a whorehouse; like a bad one, a place where you just might get robbed. Down the rough street going past the white building stood a half-dozen little houses—they were what Hillhaven had instead of Poor Fox Road. Just as they had a generation and a half ago, these houses seemed abandoned, leeringly empty, invitations to tragedy. Graham felt now, looking at the row of dilapidated and leering houses, that they were waiting there for their victims.

  * * *

  Graham stepped up onto the low wall, looked back at his car and the cluster of buildings, and then jumped the eighteen inches down into Dragon’s land.

  * * *

  First he had to get down into the gorge, make his way across the tops of the boulders, and then go up the opposite slope onto the Point itself. The slope down to the boulders looked easy enough—if he had been a child, he would have tried to slide down on the soles of his shoes. The wild rhododendron bushes growing down the sides of the gorge now seemed almost to invite Graham to use them for handholds, or for brakes if he found himself moving too quickly.

  Moving very carefully and heeling over to his right, Graham began to inch his way sideways down the slope. The earth held solidly beneath his basketball shoes. He stuck his left arm stiffly out for balance, and went down a few more steps. Soon he would reach the rhododendrons and be able to cling to them nearly all the way to the boulders. Down a few more steps, his ankles already beginning to grumble at the way they were bent. Graham bent to the side a little more and put the fingers of his right hand against the ground, steadying himself.

  His left foot found a grip six inches down the slope; his right awkwardly crossed over it and found its own place. Graham exhaled, nearly grunting: this was more work than he had expected. He dropped the left foot again, and felt moss slither under the sole of his shoe. For a moment he wobbled, almost going over, and dug his fingers into the grass: his leg slipped out from under him until the basketball shoe found a patch of bare earth and clung.

  Jesus, why am I doing this? he thought, straddling three feet of sloping ground as he drove the fingers of his right hand deep into the earth, gripping roots and a pelt of grass. Why did I come down here? He looked back up toward the top of the gorge and saw the sky wheeling blackly over the rim, the land rearing up as dizzily as a roller-coaster track.

  Graham groaned out loud. The slope he clung to was canting up like a ladder jerked suddenly perpendicular. The light had winked out. Graham was crazily conscious of the glowing dial of his radium watch—and of a wheezing, asthmatic sound he thought was the laughter of the rotting houses until he realized that it came from his chest.

  His head was swinging backward, his feet forward, in sudden night. Where he had dug his fingers into the ground, the earth scalded his hand. A tubular root against his palm suddenly burned like a hot water pipe.

  Graham flailed out with both hands, reaching for any support he could find, and immediately slipped five or six feet down the slope, scraping his belly and his face against rough stones. Then it was as if a rhododendron had twined its stalks around his hands, voluntarily stopping him from sliding onto the boulders. Graham gripped at the bush, felt it accept his hands and then find his legs. For a moment he was secure.

  “Help me!” he called out, thinking that one of the girls from the bar might hear him. “Help me!”

  He knew, and wished he did not, that the girls in that place would have heard and ignored many strange cries from Kendall Point. “Helllp! Helll . . .”

  The bush or the steep hill, or both, flexed and threw him off. He felt the muscles of the earth contract, the twigs and leaves of the bush he clung to coil into themselves and bulge monstrously, and after that he felt only air rushing away from him and his stomach falling faster than he was.

  After he struck the boulders he felt nothing.

  * * *

  A long time after, Graham opened his eyes onto a red immensity of pain. He moaned, licked his lips, moved his legs. All of him hurt so thoroughly, so comprehensively, that he was not aware of any special injuries: he himself was the injury. Yet after a few minutes, individual reports began to come in: his head was muffled in an enormous ache, and his right cheek had grown out to twice its size; his right arm sang out with pain when he tried to raise it. His hips sent up messages of drowsiness and confusion.

  He blinked twice rapidly, then twice more. He raised his left hand carefully and explored his face; wiped at his eyes. Above him the world was again taking shape, reforming itself out of the redness.

  The rim of the gorge lay like a black line beneath the sky’s starry and dark blue. Graham did not at first remember why he was outdoors, and he puzzled over the odd vertical landscape before him. He could remember staring at the map in the Historical Society . . . after that, all descended into a rushing blackness.

  He remembered a starburst exploding across the surface of a pane of glass. What had caused that?

  Graham used his left arm to prop himself upright. The world went red again and swung around him in big dizzying orbits. He moved his right arm, and the elbow reacted as though he had been kicked there. Hissing with pain, Graham opened his eyes again and saw how close he was to the top of the gorge.

  The agony in his elbow ceased as he cupped it in his left hand. Graham thought he was ready to move. He carefully lowered his right arm and put his left hand flat against the smooth surface of the boulder so that he could help himself stand. His hips agonized, bu
t he thought he had just bruised a bone or jarred the ligaments—in fact, at this moment Graham was congratulating himself on having survived his fall with so little real injury. Looking at the slope now, he could see dark scars which were the marks torn by his shoes as he stepped down—they ended about twelve feet from the boulders, and halfway between the last mark and the rock was a patch from which the moss and grass had been erased, rubbed away. Graham’s hip, its track. He was very lucky to be alive, luckier still to be whole. He tried to persuade his legs to get under him.

  His hand came down into a puddle of something sticky and wet, and Graham glanced at it more in curiosity than surprise. It was black—in the starlight it looked black. Graham did not identify this fluid as blood until he smelled it, and then he gently shook his head, wondering if the wound on the side of his face were worse than he had thought.

  He swept his hand to one side, confused, and touched another body that had been lying beside his. It was smaller than an adult body. Graham groaned again and this time forced himself to his feet. Then he tottered around the perimeter of the boulder so that he could see the face. He bent forward on his painful hips. His heart and gut contorted; the face was Tabby’s.

  Tabby’s neck had been sliced open, so savagely the boy had nearly been decapitated. He had been killed up on the rim of the gorge and then his body thrown down beside Graham: the body had the boneless ease of a discarded toy.

  “Oh, God,” Graham said. “Oh, dear God.” He had begun to cry, and unthinkingly he lifted his right hand toward his nose—the elbow screamed. Graham inhaled sharply, gripped his right wrist with his left hand, and supported the right arm atop the left while he scrubbed his nose with his sleeve. “Oh, dear God,” he repeated, and fresh tears jumped to his eyes. “Tabby.”

  Tabby opened his eyes and froze Graham to his foot of rock. “I’m dead. I’m dead, and it’s your fault.”

  Graham almost fell off the boulder. Tabby’s face was merciless.

  “You should be dead, not me,” Tabby said. “He wants you to know that.”